Next week at YC Demo Day, venture capitalists and angel investors eager to speak with the founders of tomorrow’s technology companies today, will present an array of startups from the fields of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, consumer healthcare (just to name a few).

As the 126 entrepreneurs in the latest batch prepare for their big day, we thought we’d catch up with one of these founders before their nervous 3 minute pitch to the world.

Latching on to the current excitement surrounding the rise of AI, in the wake of the dominant performance of AlphaGo, we chose Msg.ai and their founder Puneet Mehta as the startup to speak to from this year’s batch.

The company works in the field of AI for conversational commerce and in the discussion with Mehta we reveal how YC prepares founders for the 3 minute pitch that could change the trajectory of their company. Mehta talks about the mentoring process in the ever expanding YC batch, and how YC maintains the same level of quality mentoring despite the growth. Mehta also offers advice on how YC companies can use the network to the best effect and make the most out of their time in the world’s most prestigious accelerator.

In the chat, we also touch on what founders should look for when assembling their ‘team’ of investors, how bots offer consumers a value proposition never seen before, why messaging will be the future interface for transactional commerce, what barriers to adoption both messaging and AI face in their rise to the top and why all startup founders have to remember to, ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’.